Book Review: Godkiller by Hannah Kaner

 

Goodreads Summary: Kissen’s family were killed by zealots of a fire god. Now, she makes a living killing gods, and enjoys it. That is, until she finds a god she cannot kill: Skedi, a god of white lies, has somehow bound himself to a young noble, and they are both on the run from unknown assassins.
Joined by a disillusioned knight on a secret quest, they must travel to the ruined city of Blenraden, where the last of the wild gods reside, to each beg a favour.

Pursued by demons, and in the midst of burgeoning civil war, they will all face a reckoning – something is rotting at the heart of their world, and only they can be the ones to stop it.

Goodreads Ratings: 3.86 stars with over 59,000 ratings

Genre Listing: Fantasy. Fiction, Mythology, Queer, LGBT, Adult

Goodreads/Storygraph Challenge: 7/48 books

2026 Reading Challenge: #16 Read a book with an Animal on the Cover (find the full challenge here)

Book Review: 

Hello, Readers. I hope everyone is doing well. I finally finished Godkiller by Hannah Kaner. This one took me a while to get through. I've been fairly busy and just haven't had a lot of time to read, plus even though this was only 288 pages, it was just hard for me to get through.

I'll be honest. I have a love-hate relationship with this book. I got into it pretty quickly, but each chapter is a different character's perspective. If it were just every now and then, I think it would be okay, but there are four or five characters' perspectives. It made it really dense for such a short book. I'd just start getting into a character's story, and then the chapter would end, and it'd be someone else. It made me not want to pick it up most nights when I did have time to read. 

I liked Kissen and her story. I liked the world that everything was set in. I liked Inara. I didn't really have any feelings towards Elogast. Overall, it was an interesting story, but I didn't love it. I was entertained by it, but found myself wanting to know more about the gods and the world. 

The ending and romance felt lacklustre. It was fine, but the pacing just felt too quick. There was such a build-up to get where they were going that when it finally happened, it wasn't much to write home about. 

Overall, I liked it, but didn't feel like it was anything special. I picked this up mainly because I liked the cover of Sunbringer and wanted to read it. I do have that book, so I'll probably read it eventually, but it probably won't be right away. My next book is going to be Dungeon Crawler Carl because I'm giving in to peer pressure. 

Book Review: The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean

 

Goodreads Summary: Out on the Yorkshire Moors lives a secret line of people for whom books are food and who retain all of a book's content after eating it. To them, spy novels are a peppery snack; romance novels are sweet and delicious. Eating a map can help them remember destinations, and children when they misbehave, are forced to eat dry, musty pages from dictionaries.
Devon is part of The Family, an old and reclusive clan of book-eaters. Her brothers grow up feasting on stories of valor and adventure, and Devon—like all other book-eater women—is raised on a carefully curated diet of fairy tales and cautionary stories.

But real life doesn't always come with happy endings, as Devon learns when her son is born with a rare and darker kind of hunger—not for books, but for human minds.

Goodreads Rating: 3.64 with over 40,000 ratings

Genre Listing: Fantasy, Horror, Fiction, LGBT, Adult, Queer, Books About Books

Goodreads Challenge: 16/60 (I am so not finishing this.)
2024 Reading Challenge: #45 Read a book that has double letters in the title (find the entire Challenge here) 

Book Review: 

Hello Readers! I hope everyone is having a good June so far. I am having a very crazy year. I haven't gotten a chance to read much because last month, I got a 5-month-old puppy. One of my dad's dogs had an oops litter of one puppy back in January, so I took her in once I was done traveling, and she was old enough. It's been chaotic between a kitten and a puppy, working many hours, and I also started my second Master's Degree this week. Yes, I am fully aware that I am insane, and Tress will exclaim that I have no sympathy for school. I'll share pictures of my chaos animals after the review. I'll do a challenge update here soon as I have a couple of other books finished but haven't done a review for them.

I don't remember when I acquired The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean, but I'm so glad I did! I loved it from the first couple of sentences. The premise of the story was really unique and relatively dark. The book-eater race was human-like but ate books for nourishment. It was also how they retained information. I liked that Sunyi appealed to the senses by giving the books flavors, which could vary by genre and materials. The culture was pretty dark. The eaters are dying out and, as a result, have to have arranged marriages. The mind eaters have an unfortunate lot in life, having to eat minds. 

The plot, aside from the culture, is interesting. It's labeled as horror, but I didn't find it particularly scary. It's gory in places, but that's the extent of it. There's a lot of action, especially towards the end of the book. I liked the play on the Eater Families and how they mainly eat fairy tales, labeling their women as princesses, mind eaters as dragons, and the keepers of the dragons/protectors of the women knights. I also appreciated that Devon, an Eaters' Princess, saved herself and then saved her own princess. That was super cute. 

One thing that was lacking in the story was the characters' personality. They all felt a little flat to me. The book is definitely plot-driven rather than character-driven. I also thought there needed to be more context on the back story of the eaters. There is some in the book, and many of the chapters have a small blurb, but it felt like an afterthought. 

Overall, I really enjoyed it. I had wanted to finish it a while ago, but life happens. If you need help with the Challenge, this will also fit on prompt #3, as it is under 300 pages. 

And now, here are some pictures of my Chaos to show why I'm not reading or sleeping. The puppy's name is Galaxy Lynn. Her cat sister is Nebula Jane.